Janie Geiser

Ithaca College, Ithaca, Sunday, March 2nd
Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, Tuesday, March 4th
Binghamton University, Binghamton, Wednesday, March 5th
Everson Museum, Syracuse, Thursday, March 6th
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Space, Saturday, March 8th

Janie Geiser is a filmmaker and experimental puppet theater artist who has been working in the field for over 18 years. Geiser's work has been performed and screened internationally in venues such as the International Festival of Puppet Theater, the Walker Art Center, the Phenomena Festival (Jerusalem), Dance Theater Workshop, The New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and on PBS. Her exquisite short films are often inspired by doll-like figurines, typically decades old. But though she animates these figures and cutouts and other objects in her cryptic narratives, her work goes well beyond childish make-believe. Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of failure and loss, her art simultaneously creates and deconstructs illusions.

Although Geiser's films' connection to her theatrical performances is clear - they are often inspired by toy figures or inanimate objects - they are not documents of performances. Rather, they are profoundly cinematic works using multiple layers of imagery to create a complex sense of space and duration that at times recalls pre-Renaissance art. The Images Film Festival in Toronto recently presented a retrospective of her work and described the pieces as follows:

"The Red Book addresses the power of representations. With its peculiar red and black-and-white color scheme, this film begins Geiser's layering of flat and deep space, which characterizes all of her subsequent films. The Secret Story creates 'a child's vision of domestic immersion and foreboding out of crudely articulated dolls, toy blocks and paper cutouts' (Paul Arthur, Film Comment). The seductive black-and-white of Immer Zu, accompanied by music lifted from vintage film noir, discloses a world of undecipherable messages and cryptic gestures. In The Fourth Watch, Geiser's characteristic dolls and puppets are replaced by flickering video images which emerge from the darkness and the wallpaper patterns to form a ballet of ghostly motions. In Spiral Vessel, 'a found psychological test kit yields puzzle figures with cutout ears, cutoff heads and pull-away parts. The ear opens into an interior world of shifting science book images which, when isolated, evoke mysteries more than they reveal facts'

The absolutely compelling Lost Motion follows the central figure, an enameled cast-metal businessman, through a harrowing series of encounters with shadowy characters who offer magic and menace. Geiser 'creates worlds that are at once enchanted and broken, seductive and disturbed' (Fred Camper, Chicago Reader)"

Geiser's films have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, PS 1 and the Museum of Modern Art. Her films have also been featured at three New York Film Festivals, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, three San Francisco Film Festivals, ALIVE TV, REEL NY, and other venues. Her film The Secret Story was chosen by Film Comment's Gavin Smith as one of the Best Short Films of 1996, and The Fourth Watch was chosen as one of the Best Short Films of 2000.

Her original theater works have toured nationally and internationally, and she has been recognized with numerous awards, including an Obie and a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Henson Foundation, and others. She was awarded, with Vic Chesnutt, a Creative Capital grant for the early development of Josiah Meigs and Me, and received a 1998 Pew/TCG National Theater Artist Residency Grant. Geiser's theater pieces have been presented at The Public Theater, The Walker Art Center, MOCA in Los Angeles, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, LaMaMa, and other venues.

Geiser is also a nationally recognized illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. Her book The Tornado Treaty is in the Artists Book Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and three of her films are in the Museum's film collection.